The present invention relates generally to telecommunication systems for facilitating transaction processing through telephone calls, for example, a credit card transaction. In particular, the present invention relates to a system for invoking and using a transaction agent that is integrated in the transport of the telephone call as an enhanced feature or the telephone systems serving one or more of the one of the parties of the telephone call.
In the traditional approach to ordering merchandise with a credit card, a buyer may dial into an interactive voice response system (IVR) which talks to the buyer, collects credit card information, and validates the information. The buyer enters information into the IVR, with the call being passed to the called party after the credit card has been validated and possibly, charged. In other IVR systems, the buyer may give credit card information to the system which accepts the credit card information and then allows the call to go through to the seller. In either case, the call is not allowed to complete until the credit card information has been collected and validated. Furthermore, the credit card information is entered from the caller's end, not the called party's end. Finally, the credit card data must be collected by the pay telephone system or IVR that the buyer is using, which now acts as a gateway. Presently, the IVR or credit card system may not be re-summoned and the charges may not be modified or deleted during the call.
In the traditional method for ordering merchandise from a catalog company, the seller's representative has a terminal on a desk or a card swipe or zon system. The credit card information is keyed in by the seller's representative rather than being entered through the telephone call itself. The seller's representative reviews the display or the credit card station and validates the information through a system external to the telephone call between the buyer and seller's representative. Using this method, there is no opportunity to modify the information related to a transaction without reentering the external system.
The traditional approaches to ordering merchandise or processing other types of transactions over the telephone do not have the flexibility to allow either the calling party or called party to enter data or to allow either party to modify the data once it has been collected. The present invention--the Telephone Charging Agent (TCA)--addresses these limitations by allowing two or more people on a telephone call to enter data (for example credit card data or other charging data such as a card number, a home telephone number, a dollar amount, etc.) using the telephone as the instrument of data entry (either the caller's phone or the called party's phone or one of the parties may speak the information through voice recognition), to be prompted during the call for data, and have the charges validated, manipulated, or refunded during the call. The advantages of the present invention are explained further by the accompanying drawings and detailed description.